Fatherhood Eve

Friday, August 21, 2015

2 Minutes. Go!

Hey, writer-type folks. AND PEOPLE WHO JUST WANT TO PLAY BUT DON'T IDENTIFY AS 'WRITERS' - all are welcome here! Every Friday, we do a fun free-write. For fun. And Freedom!Write whatever you want in the 'comments' section on this blog post. Play as many times as you like. #breaktheblog! You have two minutes (give or take a few seconds ... no pressure!). Have fun. The more people who play, the more fun it is. So, tell a friend. Then send 'em here to read your 'two' and encourage them to play. It's chasing you, and you can't run fast enough. It darts and squirts through window cracks and under the lips of liquor store bonnets. It is in the dark corners, lurking. Did you bring your invisibility cloak? Well, good. Except that shit won't work. Not this time.

You think you hear something, but you can't be sure. You think you feel something, and you wish it was her. You lean your head against a rough, cold wall and you try to sink, push your feet into the mud, which glitters with empty candy wrappers and broken glass.

You sing a song you've sung too many times before. The lyrics don't matter anymore.

If they ever did.Thanks for stopping by! Gonna be a busy day, but, rest assured, I'll be reading everything and commenting as I have time, so check back. Post your pieces on your blogs, telephone poles, passing pedestrians, etc. if you like...it's a fun web o' writing.#2minutesgo

68 comments:

I'll do it, and I'll do it right, I come here almost every night. I see your cringe, so very slight. Your eyes which never catch the light. I hear the chirps of laughter fright. I watch your smile dazzle bright. I flounder like a snap-wood kite, and wonder what IS wrong and right?

Why must you sit here, mind shut tight? Surely, you don't think it's right - there's lots to chew so take a bite. There ain't nothing wrong with spite.

You'll take your leave and then alight. I'll leave, I guess, I think I might. Or I'll stay here, there's more to fight.

Graeme turned to see the older woman who'd addressed him. She'd got a carrier bag filled with sandwiches and looked well prepared for a long wait. Maybe he should do that next time he had to visit the surgery. She did have the appearance of someone who'd graced the benches here more often than most, judging by the walking cane and the plaster cast and the blanked-out glasses lens she was sporting. He'd found experience to be a great teacher. All he had to do was pay attention and take heed of its lessons.

Sitting back onto the skinny pads of the chair again, Graeme looked back up at the clock again, figuring out how much longer he could wait.

The hard-bitten squatters found it rather cute, when others engaged in non-violent protest demonstrations. They had been there and done that, and noticed that such tactics were largely futile against a well-entrenched status quo enforced by the world’s largest military. But just to show them how it’s done, they joined the protests, in full combat gear: gas masks, Kevlar, and loaded rifles and sidearms. Squads of ten or twenty at a time stood in rank, between the riot cops and the protesters, rifles in hand.

Tim was rather nervous, being so directly confrontational with law enforcement, but he had his friends backing him up. He stood stoically in place, as a cop approached him, looked him over, and told him, “The fuck is this? Tactical Timmy? First of all, I could arrest you for openly carrying that weapon. And from the look of it, that assault weapon is illegal in the state of California. So just make it easy on yourself and put it down.”

“I don’t think I’m gonna do that, officer. You wanna try and make me?” Tim leveled his rifle, as did several of his companions. “Fuck you, five-oh. You’re gonna chill the fuck out and let the people voice their grievances, if you wanna go home to your kids tonight.”

It just made me really sad, to hear of armed white militias clashing with protesters. Working class white people have more interests in common with people of color than the oligarchs who run the country; we should be getting their backs.

Shoot! Bad pun. Commented on this before. But you're definitely on the money here. As long as the disenfranchised keep grinding and wielding their axes against one another, the bad guys can do biz as usual. And I'm pretty close to Ferguson so this held a real impact for me. Only I didn't get sad, I got Mad. Not that that helps, either...What a world.

Grandma taught me to love the sunflowers when I was knee-high to a grasshopper. Her driveway was lined with them and just about made up for the sandburs that got stuck in my clothes and feet and had to be removed one by one, leaving a bunch of stickers behind.

She didn’t plant them; they were wild. The sandy soil could barely support wheat or pasture, but every year, even the dry ones, the sunflowers came back. She’d let me pick bouquets of them, so long as I wasn’t too greedy.

“Leave enough that there will be seed for next year,” she said.

I had to make sure I got the ants off of the sticky stems before I brought them into her house. Seemed they liked the yellow blossoms just as much as Grandma and me.The vase she put them in was made of a deep blue glass. Cobalt blue, they call it. We’d put it in the center of her table and we’d drink sweet tea from glasses shiny with sweat from the humid Nebraska summer.

She showed me the “loves me, loves me not” game, even though she said it worked better with daisies. I didn’t know what a daisy was. She made me look close at the flowers of gold, and taught me that the real flowers, the ones that set seed, were in the brown center, and if I looked close enough, I could see the tiny petals. Flowers within the flower.

She said life was like that, too. We spend too much time looking at the big things and miss the tiny things of joy. A mistake, she said, because there were so many more tiny things than big things.

When Grandma died, everybody sent roses because she always told them all that she wished she could have grown a rose garden in that dry prairie ground, like she’d had when she was a girl in Iowa. But I knew that she’d never trade her sunflowers for roses, nor Pepsi for sweet tea, and I brought a hundred sunflowers for her funeral. Her driveway was bare that day, but the sunflowers came back the next year anyway.

You push the paper lanterns out into the lake, and the moon is shamed by their glow.

We do this in memory of someone, I forget.

"How many men have you loved? Women too."

You are beautiful, born haunted, dropped into a dream of need, warmed by a lakeside sun, seeded on a trail that was gouged from the earth by a demon raping an angel. Rutted and gutted, encumbered and incubated. Or was it the other way round?

First time I saw you, your mouth rimmed with powdered sugar, I had to laugh. Laughing was hardly my default then, is less so now. You wet-fingered the sweet dust and sucked on it, like someone on a cocaine binge, and your Romany eyes danced like cryptic bordello tales stashed beneath the darkest of thoroughfares for later telling. Erotic. Driven. Most likely lost.

No one saw anything. They never did. Everything passed in the margins, whispered only by migrants in drab fields and passed via honking bird flights over waterless barrens into the icetails of comets plunging into the sun or whipped into the outer clouds of a shattered and dying system.

That was when we both stood naked and peeling before a torrid star, cancerous and boundless, tempting the planet to brush our blighted haunches while the ground splintered into cryptic droughtland and the clouds went AWOL for good.

Absence and loss and enticement. Tails and tales.

Remember that plate of eggs, sunnyside up, those sizzling strips of bacon, the dark, steaming coffee, and hot buttered toast? Our server was Naomi. She was pretty, like arroyos and dreamcatchers are pretty. The scorpions held back, laden and shadowed, dark arthritic limbs poised with toxins. The desert turned the blindest of eyes. A kitchen radio played a rebel song about secret fires, and a couple in an adjacent booth argued about Taylor Swift and Kanye, while a busload of Asian tourists stopped on the highway to witness Navajo coyotes yowl an alien dirge, ghost dance a potlatch, curb-stomp all dubious history.

My god, we were happy and didn't have one single motherfucking clue.

There were furrows we plowed and beaches we combed—true pacific stories of desolation and faith—all along that bright coastline and inland, through the tall wide conifers, climbing deadfalls, dragging palsied legs across molten prairies liquid with deer, waiting in birdless, threat-drenched silence for tsunamis or tremors, half-hoping our antic virgin ambitions would be derailed by the routine cataclysms of our unruly, blessed planet.

"Hundreds," you say.

And I blink, lost.

"Lovers. You asked how many lovers."

"Right, I think I did." I want to ask more, yet I want to ask less.

"The lanterns look like souls. Waiting to be assigned a place."

"They don't even know they can just go choose a place."

"Yeah. Yes."

Vehicles rush by, not far for the crow, yet way below this grassy crest. In each one a drama plays out, even if it's the slow red cellophane draw on a trucker's cigarette or a wayward nun's nylon-clad foot pecking an R&B beat while the dot-dash lines come and go—morse, remorse, despair, and hope—and tragicomedies begin with the smallest trickle of tiny stones atop a slope.

You watch me carefully, and I try to shrug you off, shrug everything off.

My god. Goddess. Pierce my chest with sharpest bone and lean me back under the merciless heat until I tear.

Billboards about Jesus and corn and abortions pass rapid to our right, like maledictions. Cursed and unnerving and joyless as Judas's empty sunless pockets.

Okay. I submit. I submit. Goddamn me to hell and worse, I fucking submit. And as soon as I do, the dripping, segmented limbs of a vast and terrible horror clamber ungainly over the black horizon, and our hopeless, maladroit screams ring out like the most graceless of bitter music. Fallen. Condemned.

Wow! Sometimes the muse is a bitch,huh? Gorgeous, gorgeous. Evocative and strange. Love the billboards. But it DOES kinda make me feel like I should help find you a NICER girlfriend. I'm a real yenta that way...:)

That summer, the skies bloomed orange at night from the fires on the mountains. Trees once green, once turned gold in autumn, but now, they turned to black. From the sky fell not white snowflakes, but gray ashes.

There were screams of animals tired of running, at last overcome by smoke and flame. A firefighter swore that he’d seen the souls of twenty elk rise up into the air as their bodies fell to the ground, souls of sparks and light but not of fire. Of life. Of the promise to return.

In spring, months after the fire crews and insurance adjusters and news cameras left, in the crematorium of cinders and black trees and white bones, a seed or two or twenty or a thousand took root. With roots in the ashes of despair, those seedlings rose up and looked around and decided to try again.

Ten years on, a small herd of twenty elk found the newborn forest, led by a white bull, whether ghost or albino only the elk and the trees could tell.

She arose early that morning. Slipping from the bed she’d shared with her husband of fifty-two years, she avoided the floorboard that creaked and went into the kitchen. Silently she scooped the coffee grounds into the basket of the percolator and set it on the stove. The blue flames from the burner cast quiet shadows in the kitchen, the kitchen that would be yellow when the sun rose, too.

So very tired. Joints racked by arthritis. Heart broken over and over. Her body was, at last, weary of the effort to rejuvenate or even recover. She pulled the terrycloth robe with transparent elbows closer to her shivering body, pretending that the cold was of her flesh, not of her soul.

There was no one left to lose. Her husband, her son, her best friend; all had preceded her in death. When it came time to print her obituary, “survived by” would be followed by a gap as large as the pain in her heart.

She wept without sound as the coffee pot percolated. She found her favorite mug, a gift from the child her son once was, and put a teaspoon of sugar in before filling it with coffee. Coffee that her doctor said would kill her.

She held the mug close to her face, in both her hands, trying to absorb its heat and its aroma, and she sorted through the memories of the breakfasts she used to make for her family.

When they found her, her body was on the kitchen floor, surrounded by the fragments of a ceramic cup and a life well lived.

Hiram was taller here. Slimmer. Clean-shaven. But it was the same scowling face I was accustomed to back on Terra Vera. We had served together on interplanetary plaxis our welder fathers had built once the astro-genius Dr. Hwang Dodson penned and patented his galactic formula which loosened the spatial and temporal constraints of light-year traveling. Galactonauts could zoom to systems humankind never dreamed existed and return to Earth without having aged more than if they had vacationed six months in the Caribbean.

Our fathers built the plaxi ships in which Hiram and I and the others reached for the stars. We were the first to actualize Dodson’s Theory and come back home to rave about it. In fact, in the beginning Hiram Avilos was my navigator, but then the New NASA assigned him his own craft and on a mission from M434Blue, with Earth in sight, he spun it out of control and caught the tail end of an alternate Earth and was sucked into its orbit and finally crash landed on one of its beaches.

I was sent to retrieve him. A search for two plaxi drivers in a galaxy of true, as well as parallel clods of dirt and stone. With Dr. Dodson’s help I found Hiram in a desert town where he sat on a lawn chair sipping a bottle of Tres Caballos, several native girls fanning him with palms. His navigator lay sleeping on a nearby blanket.

“I ain’t going back, Whitman. Just turn your plaxi up that way and rev home.”

“Hiram, this is not Earth.”

Hiram Avilos laughed which started the girls laughing with him, though I doubt they knew why.

“Okay, amigo. So what? I like it here.”

I folded my arms like a man waiting for what came next. I brushed away the tallest of the green-haired beauties tossing me come-on twinkles with her golden eyes.

Desperately I pleaded with him. “Earth, Hiram, not some copy ––”

Now Hiram was squinting his eyes and scowling bigger than ever. “Get out of here, Whitman. Don’t make me say it again.”

I turned and walked towards the plaxi. I could hear faint laughter coming from Hiram. Then he called out to me, “Whitman, tell ‘em I got lost in space. My plaxi ran out of gas.”

Blue smoke turned orange as the sun neared the horizon, and the mountains burned orange after sunset. A thousand thousand campfires might have smelled a bit like the air that summer, but the ghost stories from that year were more real than anyone wanted to think.

Shane was a firefighter. A hotshot, they called him. He followed the fires and did his best to put them out with his team. Good money, but all the money in the world didn’t make up for all the loss he’d seen. Buddies burned to death when the wind changed. The gray ashes that came up from his lungs when he coughed. The animals whose charred flesh he found in the forest of burned trees.

And the year that Shane had had enough, he went to get lost in the forest, to forget all the horror.

He saw ghosts, grateful ghosts, who said thank you. The bears, the elk, the men. On the night of a full moon, the spirit of his grandfather, also a firefighter, came to visit. He told Shane the secret stories of rainbows and lightning and thunder and love and loss and fire. He showed Shane the pale white moonbow, under the raincloud on the horizon.

“Just like a rainbow, but reflecting the moon’s light, not the sun.”

Shane nodded.

“Looks like it’s all white, though, without any color.”

Shane nodded again.

“But here is the secret of moonbows. The colors are all there, but our eyes are too weak to see them.”

Shane gave one more nod.

“Sometimes we’re too weak to see the color of hope, too, boy.”

Shane left the forest the next morning. He’d been gone for seven weeks. When he came out, he was quieter than he used to be, and the staring of his eyes was a mile or two beyond where he could see. He was looking for the color of hope.

To be honest, when I was a boy I looked at girls. They could have worn burlap sacks and I still would have gazed at them constantly. I found them then as I do now. Remarkable, beautiful, mysterious, wonderful, intelligent, confusing, and frightening. I could have been blind and I still would have found them the most fascinating creation in the universe. I don't care what they wear, listen to those wonderful voices. Trying to figure out if they like you... It seemed at times they did, those wonderful rare times you thought you had broken the code. These are the things real boys are captivated by. Bra straps? Hemlines? Whatever. These are not living things, nothing to ponder about, dream of. Females, now that's what real dreams are made of.

Make me young and beautiful, you’d told the doctor, but you can’t feel your face anymore. Is that part of it? You read the literature they sent you home with, but nothing covers a lack of sensation above the neck. A litany of other symptoms, yes, including rashes in places you don’t want to think about and a heartbeat in syncopated rhythm and a sudden facility in Cyrillic languages, but that creeping numbness? Nothing. Maybe a glass of water will help, but it sloshes down the side of your mouth and saturates the last clean T-shirt you own. It could take a while to recover and even longer to see results, he said, so anticipating the need to huddle into a corner with bad television and comfort food, you’d sent everyone away, but now, you wish you’d thought that through a second longer. He told you to avoid mirrors for a while, but you can’t help yourself, and for a second, you don’t know who that person has become. Grandma? Aunt Harriet? A reject from the wax museum, left in the back of a warehouse to sag into anonymity? You used to look like someone once, but now you can’t remember who that was. A famous movie star whose name evades retrieval? You don’t recall “loss of proper nouns” from the list they said to watch for. Knee pain, overlapping toes, sudden urges to sing opera, yes. But such specific memory loss? No. You can’t feel your face anymore. You slide a hand down someone else’s cheek, over someone else’s lips. Not recalling the last time you did so. Maybe the dosage of your take-home medication was too high, and one of the symptoms is forgetting how to follow instructions. You check again, but there’s nothing on the pamphlet. Literally, there’s nothing now, as if the words were printed in disappearing ink. You crumple it in your fist, savoring the feel, the bite of crisp edges, as if it’s the last sensation that will ever flow over your nerve endings. You squeeze your eyes shut—or at least that’s what you think you’re doing—and scream at your mind to remember. The shape of the doctor vacillates like the air above a desert road. You can’t feel your face…you can’t feel anything…you can’t…

Gary Stevens parked as far from the door as he could, beneath an overhanging tree that shaded the spot from the glow of the street light. He turned off the headlights yet kept the motor running as he sat there staring at the door of the funeral home, hoping someone would go in or she would come out.

After fifteen minutes of sweating in silence except for the sound of his own heartbeat, a silver Camry turned into the drive and parked next to her car. When the priest climbed out and opened the funeral home door, Gary turned off his car's engine, took a deep breath, which caught in his throat, stepped out and walked into the mortuary.

He was pretty sure his mom wouldn't mind if he was late to her wake, but didn't want to confront his sister without backup.

“They found a new planet.” Grace said, shoving the paper across the table. ”Isn’t it exciting? Seems like they find some new planet or asteroid or something out there in space practically every week now.”Harvey was deep in the sports page and barely looked up. “Ain’t new.”“It is though, “ she insisted, settling her round behind back into the kitchen chair. “Bigger’n Jupiter, they think.”“Don’t make it new.”“For heaven’s sake, Harvey, aren’t you listening? They discovered a new planet!”Harvey put the paper down, creasing it four neat ways, the same as he had every morning for the past 40 years. “That planet ain’t new, “ he insisted. “Only thing new is that somebody found it. Been there all along.”“But it could sustain life! The article says, it’s got a atmosphere!’“Pfft. They always say that. That’s like lookin’ at a picture in the John Deere catalog and sayin’ I am that man. Right up there on that seat. That is my machine. It’s the same thing they want you to think about outer space.” Grace squinted at him as she went to clear the breakfast plates. Words like pig-headed and hide bound bounced around in her head, but she chose instead: ”I don’t follow that, Harvey. I don’t follow that at all.”“It’s advertising! That’s all. Pure-D bullshit. They want to get you thinking you can spend that kinda money; they want you to believe you could own that thing; that the man in the picture is just like you! But he ain’t, see? ‘Cause that tractor don’t belong to you and you got fields that ain’t gonna plow themselves. And you ain’t no closer to that tractor than Earth is to Jupiter. So you got to use what you got to get the job done. The rest is just a distraction.”“ I swear to Jesus, you ain’t got the imagination to fill my back teeth.” Grace ran water in the sink. “What if there were life on some other planet? What if we could go there in a spaceship someday and learn about a different kind of people than humans? About a whole new way of life? What if thing were better out there? What if they were different?” She turned and faced him head on, hands on her hips. “What then, Mister Knows Everything? What then?”Harvey rose slowly to his feet. “Then they’d be after us or we’d be after them and before you know it, there’d be some kinda goddamn war. And you know what that war would be about, Grace?”“No I do not. But you’re gonna tell me anyway, so get on with it.”“It’d be about who owns the godamned fields, that’s what. On this planet or the next one.And who’s gonna plow them, and who gets to eat what they grow there. It’s a can of worms, Grace.And do you know what else? ”Grace shook her head and uttered a long exasperated sigh. “What, Harvey?”“You start to believe in Life on other planets, before you know it, the goddamn government’s making you plant alien cantaloupe. Just think about it. Wouldn’t want that for breakfast, would you?”Later, she would remember that conversation. Later, she would replay many times in her mind the way he creased the newspaper in 4 places every morning and the way he jammed his hat down on his head with one hand reached for his keys with the other. She got where she could smile a little at his pig-headed ways and a view of the world that extended no further than 62 acres and the second hand tractor that kept breaking down.And sometimes in the evening, she’d dare herself to go out on the porch and listen to the night sounds and look at the stars and wonder. But Harvey never came home that day and he never came back. And all they ever found to mark his passing was an overturned tractor in a worn out back field, the surrounding crop burned in a perfect circle that extended all around and nothing would ever grow again.

God, this is so good. I can see these people perfectly. The dialogue is spot on. I just want it to be longer. And this: “ I swear to Jesus, you ain’t got the imagination to fill my back teeth.” - awesome.

Fuck you. He muttered it under his breath, but not enough. The man's head snapped in his direction, and he looked away, startled mockingbird eyes. But the man stood up.

What did you say?

Me, I didn't say nothing. Fuck you. Nothing.

I heard what you said. You don't know me, bitch. You 'bout to learn.

The first punch shattered the dirty man's jaw. Then it was all a dark red ball of confusion. Boots to the ribs. Something smashed on the back of his skull. He groaned and then he heard shouts, running. Felt a latex hand turning him.

Jenny, I love you. Baby, you know it. All those promises were true when I made 'em. Your sister was the one who started it ... aw, shit, Jenny, don't you know? Who was there for you when your old man died. Not your fucking family. I was there. And I didn't mean to hit you, but you get me so goddamn aggravated.

Jenny, I love you so much. Don't cry, baby. DON'T FUCKING CRY. Sorry, Jesus. Sorry, I didn't mean to yell. I'm just so upset. You make me upset when you act like this, Jenny. I just love you so much. Damn, you know it's no lie.

Jenny, baby, you gotta give me another chance. I promise it won't happen again. You know you love me like I love you. Jenny. Baby. Look at me. LOOK AT ME!

The soft fur felt like liquid on her skin. She looked in the full length mirror. God, what a beautiful coat. All hers. Grandma, I'm gonna sell your coat and buy some coke.

She cackled. Did a bump with a yellow-red nail.

Yeah, this coat is the shit. You had class, you old bitch. I'll give you that. Jimmy will love this. And it don't even get cold in LA. It does get hot. It does get lonely. You didn't know about that, did you? With your parties and your dresses and your kids.

I bet you this coat gets me $200. I'll tell Jimmy it used to belong to Betty Davis. That fucker will believe anything.

She turned one last time, swirling the mink in the streaked glass. Her nose was bleeding. She smiled.

Yep... and a brillliant use of a prop... take the characters outside of themselves by making them focus on something external... well done. Oh, one thing, it's "Bette" Davis. My gay tendencies won't let that one pass :-)

He stomped the stairs. She slammed the door. Neither could,"Take this crap, any more!"She lied. His heart hurt-the pain, he thought he'd hide.He from the bedroom, she from the bath- both came running when the baby cried.Anger forgotten. So was the wrath. The love that looked up to them, the arms that reached out, made them forget what their disagreement was about.

Matthias struggled to his feet, shards of rock coursing to the ground as he stood.

“Enough. Enough,” he said, turning to face his accusers. “Surely you need not do this again, for am I not already dead?”

The ringleader shook his head, his eyes disbelieving. “If you're moving, you're living, surely?” he offered, reasoning on behalf of the others already recovering the better stones from around Matthias' feet.

Judas' replacement dusted himself down again. “Look,” he said, holding a sizeable sliver of glass before his mouth. “No breath. I must be dead.”

“It's a trick,” Judean Goon#1 muttered into his beard. “It's a demon glass. One fashioned to an unworldly design. Like a chicken that speaks.” He nodded enthusiastically, agreeing with himself. “I've heard of those. It proves anything can be perverted by darkness. Even a man's lunch.”

Matthias sighed, suddenly feeling hungry. “I've a mission,” he said, rubbing his scarred stomach. "I need to get to Jerusalem but first I must eat.”

Goon#1 frowned. “There's no such thing as a free meal. You'll have to sing for it.” He looked about, seeing assent from the others. “Go on!”

The saint nodded, coughing up a lungful of dust. “Okay,” he said. “Picture a bright blue ball just spinning...”

Thanks, Jd, Leland. My thought was, "I wonder if I could write a poem?" Some great stories on this page, always. Thanks for opening it up like this.Oh, and for some reason, it never lets me "reply" to anyone's stories.